The prestigious "Enrico Fermi" Prize has been awarded for 2017 to Gianpaolo Bellini, Veniamin Berezinsky and Till Arnulf Kirsten "for their outstanding contributions to neutrino physics and astrophysics", in particular:

to Gianpaolo BELLINI (Università di Milano and INFN-Sezione di Milano), "for the measurement of the solar neutrino spectrum, providing the evidence for nuclear hydrogen fusion in the Sun and for adiabatic neutrino flavour conversion in matter";

to Veniamin BEREZINSKY (Gran Sasso Science Institute-GSSI and INFN-LNGS, L’Aquila), "for his theoretical contributions to the cosmogenic production of ultra-high energy neutrinos, to high energy neutrino astronomy and to the solar neutrino problem";

The Prize was created by the Society in 2001, to commemorate the great scientist on the occasion of the centenary of his birth. The Prize is yearly awarded to one or more members of the Society, who particularly honoured physics with their discoveries. A commission of experts appointed by the SIF, the CNR, the INAF, the INFN, the INGV, the INRIM and the Centro Fermi (Museo Storico della Fisica e Centro Studi e Ricerche "Enrico Fermi") selects the winners from a list of candidates and sends its conclusions to the Council of the Society for approval. The award ceremony will be part of the opening session of the 103rd National Congress of the Society in Trento on the 11th September 2017.

The discoveries of the 2017 Fermi Prize winners were developed in the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory (LNGS). The laboratory was created by A. Zichichi (Fermi Prize 2001), at that time President of the INFN, launching the "Gran Sasso Project" in 1979. The LNGS became formally one of the INFN National Laboratories in 1986 and is now the world’s largest underground facility and with high energy laboratory standard infrastructures.

It has been known since many years by now that neutrinos do not behave as foreseen by the Standard Model of elementary particles: they are not massless and the flavour eigenstates produced by weak interactions are not the mass eigenstates, but mixtures of them. The 2015 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to T. Kajita and A. McDonald "for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass". The Prize crowned the research performed over decennia in underground laboratories around the world, starting from the anomalies observed in two classes of natural phenomena, on the atmospheric and on the solar neutrinos. To be precise, two are the observed processes: neutrino oscillations, observed in atmospheric and solar neutrinos, and adiabatic neutrino conversion in matter (also, even if improperly, called oscillations) observed in solar neutrinos. The LNGS and the awardees have played a crucial role in this process.

The solar neutrino problem has been with us for more than 30 years, and up to 2001-2002, when the SNO experiment (Nobel Prize) finally demonstrated that it is due to neutrino oscillations. However, already in 1990, the GALLEX experiment, led by T. Kirsten had measured the solar electron neutrino flux down to the lowest energies, finding it much smaller than the theoretical expectations. The dominant low energy component can be predicted with small uncertainties, from the solar luminosity, but is the most difficult to measure.

During the following decade, when the statistical and systematic uncertainties had been gradually reduced, V. Berezinsky, on the basis of the data of GALLEX, and of the similar experiment SAGE in Russia, reached the conclusion that the astrophysical solution of the solar neutrino problem was very unlikely. Neutrino oscillations started to appear as the most probable solution. More generally, Berezinsky is a leader theorist in astrophysics and neutrino physics. His 1969 work with Zatsepin on extreme energy neutrinos (now called BZ neutrinos) was the first computation of cosmogenic neutrino flux. He is also the author, using a neutrino gamma connection, of the important "cascade bound" on the high-energy neutrino fluxes. This can be considered the beginning of the multi-messenger approach to astrophysics.

G. Bellini led the BOREXINO experiment since the initial phases of the proposal and of the long and difficult research and development process to reach the extreme radio-purity conditions necessary for the experiment to be successful. No other experiment has been able to reach such conditions till now. Since ten years, under Bellini's leadership, the experiment measures with increasing sensitivity and precision the solar neutrino spectrum in real time. The separate measurement of the different main components of the dominant proton proton cycle, namely 7Be, 8B, pep and pp, has proved the consistency both of the solar model and of our understanding of neutrino oscillations. It should be also mentioned that BOREXINO observed for the first time the neutrinos radioactively produced in the Earth crust.

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